Lessons Learned from Enterprise Leaders on Growing and Evolving $1M to $100M ARR

Please welcome our panel: Craig Hansen, General Partner at Next World Capital; Godard Abel, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at G2; Ivan Wassenaar, CEO of Airware; and Mark Diouan, President of Zuora.

All right. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. I am super excited about the panel we have here set up today. So in a minute, I'll turn it over to them to give the brief introduction of themselves. But we have Yvonne Wassenaert from Airware, Marc Dewan from Zora, and Godard Abel from G2 Crowd. So the goal of this is really to walk through and discuss real-world lessons, hard-fought insights, and frankly, admitting and talking about all the things that don't go well on the path from $1 million to $100 million in ARR. It all seems great in hindsight. Everything looks great when the companies are off to a brilliant exit or going public. But the truth of it is, as we all know, and as a lot of the execs and CEOs and founders in the room know, It's really hard in the meantime, and a lot of stuff doesn't go well. So we can learn a tremendous amount by the things that don't go well and how we adapt, pivot, learn, and grow out of that. So that's what this is about. So let's get into it. We'll get into some real-world truth, honesty, talking about the real stories and what's going on. So with that, let me turn it over. And Yvonne, would you maybe give the quick introduction of yourself and give us a sense for the companies you've been involved with so we know their stories.

Happy to do that. And I love how you frame this. Here's everybody who failed, but we succeeded in our failures. So I, I've spent a little over 25 years working in technology scaling companies, um, some larger ones. I worked at VMware as an executive from $2 billion to $6 billion, going from server virtualization to the software-defined data center. Uh, moved over to New Relic, helped take New Relic public. And currently I'm CEO of a startup that's on the lower end of the 1 to 100. And so I've learned a lot and looking forward to sharing what has worked and what hasn't.

Great.

Marc Dewandt, so president of Zora, 25 years experience in management. At Zora, this is my 5th year. Before Zora, I work almost 19 years for a company called PTC. Based in the East Coast. And that company, I've been a part of this company from when the company was 600 people, $150 to $200 million. And we built up, I will say, a business in 8 years of $1.3 billion. So I failed a lot. I will say I all the time succeeded, but you have to fail to be able to succeed. And I'm hoping that we'll be able to share with you some good stories and help you to learn.

Great. Hi, I'm Godard Abel. And, uh, I've been building SaaS enterprise companies about 20 years, and we're now building our third company. My first company, I started at the tail end of the dot-com era, which a lot of you may not remember, but that was in 2000. And my first company was all about struggle. You know, we almost died in 2003, but eventually the company did well and was bought by Oracle. But I think that company maybe took 14 years to get to $100 million. And our second company we started was G2 Crowd. Which, um, I'm still working on today. But also in between, we built another company called SteelBrick, which is now part of Salesforce. And I think that company got from 1 to 100 in more like 4 years. So we learned a lot the first time, and, uh, but still learning a lot the third time, but look forward to sharing.

Great. All right. And my name is Craig Hanson. I'm a general partner at NextWorld Capital. We're an enterprise tech fund. Focused VC headquartered here in San Francisco, also have offices in London and Paris. Uh, we'll typically lead rounds and then we also accelerate the growth of our companies through a global enterprise platform where we partner with over 100 of the largest global corporates that connect with our startups as customers and partners. All right, well, let's kick it off, uh, and I'll start with Yvonne and then we'll go through everyone, but give us a sense for, As you've seen on that path from 1 to 100 and beyond, what are the biggest challenges or the hardest parts that you have to get through on that path?

It's a great question, and I don't want to burst anybody's bubble, but it's always hard. It's hard at a million. It's hard at 10. It's hard at 100. It's hard at a billion. But to me, when I reflect back on what are the biggest challenges, I believe it's when you have to let go of something that you love and you're good at. In the examples I'll use, at Airware, we're a commercial drone analytics company. And we started off manufacturing hardware and doing software analytics. The founder was an aerospace engineer out of MIT. Many of the companies were aerospace engineers. And when it became clear that we needed to exit hardware and really focus on the software analytics and the machine learning and all of that, it was just really hard to make that pivot. And it was hard because it was personal. It's where they grew up and it's what they knew. And so the company made that pivot. That's how— part of how I ended up being CEO. But that was really, really hard. And similarly at New Relic, Lou Cerny, the founder and CEO, he's a developer. He's a developer at heart. We sold to developers. Developers loved us. And when we realized we wanted to take the company public one day, we realized we had to sell to enterprise. And enterprise buyers are different. And it wasn't just download the software, fall in love, get a t-shirt, you know, buy a subscription. You guys think that's funny. That's really what it was. And then, and Lou actually wrote a blog. He said, we'll never sell us, we'll never do a steak dinner. We'll never have an enterprise Salesforce. And it became company history. And he is like, we need an enterprise Salesforce. And he hired, you know, Hillary, who had been president of sales at Salesforce, and it was her charter to build that. But the biggest challenge was even though Lou got over it and said, hey, that's the right thing for the company. At that point, the company was 400 people. And to go through the shift of from marketing budget to sales budget, and then the engineers had to think about scalability and reliability and security versus just new feature functionality. It was a huge shift and it took the whole company from something they loved and something they knew to a new space. And it was the right thing, but it was hard.

Yeah. Great. Mark, how about you? What, what do you think are the biggest, setbacks or hurdles you have to get through on that path?

Oh gosh, that's me. I can spend all day talking about, not, not particularly about Zora, but for my entire career. And I would like to focus really on Zora. Zora, it's close to 1,000 people now. Uh, this is my 5th year and I have the tendency to say that every day you have to think about reinventing yourself. And do an iteration around some of your processes of the organization. And I like to call it, there is no smooth ride. That's mean, guys, success, it's never happened overnight. This is the reality. And I all time like, in 25 years, this is my third company only. I like complex backend solutions and complex problem that we have to solve. They are hard to solve, but when you solve them, I believe you can build up real competitive modes. So at Zora, in 5 years, we had multiple, what I will call, plateaus or pivot moments where you have to rethink about entirely the entire company process and organization. And probably the most interesting one is I joined the company back in early 2014. Work at two jobs from October 13th to almost January. First year, my goal was really to give the level of confidence to the people of the company that we can win and this company can be a really good success. So I had to roll up the sleeve. I moved from managing almost 2,000 people to manage a team of 50 people. And rolling up the sleeve, going there and win. So after the first year, very successful. It was actually too easy. Okay, I said, wow, we can really grow and sustain 50%, 100% growth year over year. And then we hit a wall a year later because we moved up markets where small, medium-sized companies, mainly SaaS in the cloud for the subscription revenue management, and we wanted to move up markets. And moving up markets, It's coming with a lot of different challenges, all set of different challenges there. It's the buyers are different, complexity around the MSA, product fits. So you have to rethink about the entire company processes. But what I like is you have absolutely every time you do something, think about how you can push the envelope of the company. And the company is with the product organization. The engineering organization, the management organization, marketing organization. This is how you can evolve. And every plateau come basically, you know, if it's successful, if you really focus on the right problem and solve it, it will come with another, I will say, years of fast scale and growth. So I had almost sometimes 2 plateaus a year. That's mean 2 times a year I have to work days and nights, weekend, bring the team, Look through all the deals, what's worked, what didn't work, where the product has some gaps. So this is the constant iterations. And even now, 1,000 people, we keep doing that almost, you know, every quarter, every quarter. So the takeaway here for you guys is nothing is granted. What is working today, it's working until it's gonna break. And leadership is to be capable to see when it's gonna break and start to anticipate the problem there and fix them before, I will say, we'll just get stalled. And when it's breaking, you have that doubt that you have to overcome. The people, they are doubting. The employees, they don't know exactly what to do. So you have to be extremely hands-on into the detail until you reach a certain level of scale from the organization to be able to have leaders that can do what you could do to be able to overcome those challenges. Mm-hmm.

Good. And how about you? From that early product market fit to global scale, it was just completely easy, right? No challenges, nothing hard to do, or did you have to work through some stuff?

No, I, I haven't figured that out yet. Um, but I think for me, I think the, a lot of the struggle was emotional. And I remember my first company, Big Machines, I mentioned we started in the tail end of the dot-com era, raised a bunch of money, and then frankly we burned over $20 million. and we're almost bankrupt. And, um, and I remember 2004 was probably the bottom for me, but I remember this was Big Machines. I kind of realized we have to sell because we couldn't raise any more money. So we have $20 million, we'd only grown to a million in revenue and it was 2003 and nobody was buying anything. And so my co-founder and I, we, and actually I moved to Chicago at the time because we were almost out of money and the decided it'd be cheaper and better, and he was from there. But I remember in 2004, we really needed the steel. Our biggest customer was SPX, and they were about an hour north of Chicago in Wisconsin, somewhere kind of by Lake Geneva. And I remember we drove up there, and we were gonna see their president, Don Canterna, to get a big add-on order. It was about $300,000, which would, you know, kind of fund our business for 3 months. I remember we showed up in the lobby, Go to the receptionist. I'm like, hi, I'm Godard Abel from Big Machines. I'm here to see Don Canterna. And she's like, funny. He's like, well, Don isn't here today. And you know, we had an appointment. He's like, he didn't even bother letting us know he wasn't going to be there. So needless to say, we're going to leave without the deal. And then I remember my co-founder and I were kind of just silent in the car driving back towards Chicago. And also I remember that year my twins were born and they came out. 9 weeks, 2 days premature. So I'm driving back to Chicago, and they're in the NICU intensive care. And I'm like, man, I'm like, my life can't get any worse than this. And but I— it was very— but then somehow, you know, I felt very obviously down and very scared. And I think I had this constant fear of failure because also my first investor was my father. And then I'm like, oh man, I'm going to lose my dad's money. Company's going bankrupt, I can't sell, and my kids are in the hospital. And, um, and, but then I think kind of when I had that realization, I was in my car, I'm like, and then I'm like, oh, well, things can only get better. And, and from there, luckily they did. I mean, my boys actually did really well. 4 weeks later they came out of the hospital and today they're 13. And they're doing amazingly well. And, um, and also Big Machines, ultimately we did learn how to sell. Well, actually about 6 months later, I think we actually went back to see Don and he signed the deal. And the weird thing is he never apologized. Like he just acted like it never happened. And eventually, you know, the company had success and Oracle bought it. And, uh, but I think just, I think gaining that emotional, it became a very spiritual journey. And I remember all those years I felt like I had a cloud of anxiety in my forehead, which was my company, and it would never leave me. And then eventually I actually met a conscious leadership coach and kind of started working on my own consciousness. And luckily I think my second and my third company, I no longer have that cloud of anxiety and it's still a struggle, but just saying learning how to deal with my own emotion and growing spiritually through the journey, that's probably been the biggest. I think, thing I gained from that struggle.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Thanks.

You know, one of the most interesting things for me is seeing how in a lot of cases companies have to make a couple of hard pivots on their path. And it's not just the really early stage companies that are trying to find that product market fit. Sometimes even after you find that or that initial product market fit, you have to do something meaningfully different after that, either how you're positioning the product, what market you decide to go for, upmarket, downmarket, how you're gonna go out and sell the product. Let's dive into that. Maybe Yvonne, thinking about to either New Relic or the Airware experience, has there been a pivot that you've had to make along the course as you find that sweet spot of growth and the right model for you guys?

Yeah, I, I, foreshadow a little bit a couple of the pivots we've made at Airware and New Relic. What I'd like to call out, like, people talk about pivots like they're black and white. Like, did you make a pivot or did you not? And the reality is, I think we need to appreciate that there are pivots that are black and white. You're either in hardware or you're not. And when you're making a decision like that, And it's truly a market positioning decision. Like, make it and be done with it. Don't drag it on. Don't get all emotional about it. You're trying to figure out the right answer for the company. It's product market fit, how you're going to scale. And you're going to have to make some hard decisions. But make it. Rip the Band-Aid off and move on. That, in my mind, is a hard pivot. Airware made that around hardware. And I joined the company 6 months after the layoff, and they were still mourning. It was like I cut off an arm and a leg. But now we're thriving, and we're healthy. And the people who left still think well of the company and their shareholders. And so it all turns out OK. The other type of pivot is important to understand, may not be that as severe. And so for New Relic, for example, we sold— we had developer love. When we sold into the enterprise, what we realized is it wasn't, "We're gonna never sell to developers again." It was really much more of an extension. It was much more of, "OK, we're selling to developers, and they're really important to us, and oh, by the way, we can also sell to these people up here who can write really big checks, and how cool would that be?" And what we had to learn was how to balance that and how to transition the company over time. Time and really what I would say expand it, so not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And so to me, when I think about the decisions that I make at Airware, I try to get really clear with the executive team on is this a true, you know, it was a bad decision or it was a good decision until now and now it has to change and we're really going stage left, or is this we need to expand into new areas. And what is that transition time and what does it have to look like? And that, that thought process has served me well.

All right, Marc, how about you? I know through our experience with Zora, there have been a couple of different growth phases, right? What did you have to change or do differently or find your way into the better position?

You know, it's a, it's, it's a very interesting question. And, uh, before joining Zora, I thought that I want every cycle somehow for a company possible, even if I joined PTC probably when the company was already public. But we scaled from, as I said, almost $150-200 million to $1 billion in 8 years with one single product. Then we acquired NumberOne and we pivot the business more toward enterprise software from one product, one individual product tool. At Zora, in a little bit more than 4 years, the speed of the market today is so fast. You have to be able to make a decision really quick. And you have those forces. You have the market forces, the competition forces. Your people every day come in with new ideas. And I believe your ability somehow To think about that and do what is right and keep really focused on what is working is really important for your success. And earlier, I was talking about that moment when we try to move up markets. And you should surround yourself. It's never alone. You need to have that core team within the organization that you trust. They went through that. They can filter this message and give you the right information. And get together and think about what you should be doing there. Godard, we were partner, and then when Salesforce acquired Sealbreak, we said, "Should we pivot? Should we do something different?" And I remember spending that weekend with the team thinking about what we should be doing here. And you have absolutely to understand what is your sweet spots, why your customers are really buying your technology, And regardless of the size of the companies, this is who we are and you have absolutely to stay focused around that core and don't try basically to go everywhere. So our success today at Zora, if I'm looking where the company is today and where the company was couple years ago, we had probably 10 competitors in markets. Zora 5 years ago was the same size of a lot of other startup. And I believe the reason why we really won is because focus on the customers, which problem you are trying to solve. And it's a big problem. Don't try to solve everything. Solve what really does matter the most to your customers. And then from there, scale. And your ability to stay really focused and keep the entire organization focused despite all those forces that I was talking about before, this is, this is really the leadership. This is really important. You have a vision. You have really a strategy and you need to have the execution arm that shouldn't be distracted by anything else. It's really around the execution, around that vision and that strategy. And I believe this is what's made Zora who we are today in the subscription revenue management and in revenue management market. Mm-hmm.

Gordon, how about you? What things either at Big Machines or SteelBrick did you have to change and adjust along the way, or either, or even make a hard pivot to find the new space or positioning.

Yeah. And I think Big Machines was more, we started way too wide and this was still a dot-com business plan. But everyone, I started Big Machines, we said, hey, we're gonna sell big machines on the internet. The internet was still pretty new. And, and actually my father had a pump manufacturing company. He had complex engineered industrial pumps and we said, hey, we're gonna sell those online. And, but at the time I said, not only are we gonna help him sell it through his website, we're gonna create a marketplace. We're gonna help buyers of machinery. We called it eBuy. And so we had about 4 products as our vision. And then I remember kind of one by one after year, we're like, oh, marketplace isn't gonna work. Next year I was like, okay, eBuy isn't gonna work. Then we're like, okay, direct to customer isn't gonna work. And we kind of just wound up, all we're gonna do is a little configurator to help these companies' sales reps sell their product better. But it was like a massive narrowing. And, and I recently actually watched Peter Thiel. He has a great video on building, well, he says everything is a monopoly or a commodity. And his point is you'd rather be a monopoly, which actually seems obvious, but I think he's, his point is the more, the more narrowly at the beginning you define your market. And the big machines I did totally wrong. I, I went after really big TAM and his point is, hey, the more narrow you start. And that was more like SteelBrick and SteelBrick had started by Max Rudman, an entrepreneur, and he started very focused. He said, all I'm gonna do is, he called it QuoteQuickly initially, just QuoteQuickly, just for Salesforce customers, just on the Salesforce platform and just kind of mid-market growth tech companies. So it was very narrow and he built a perfect product for that. And then when I partnered with him, we kind of had the luxury of starting very narrow. And then, you know, over time we expanded. Eventually we went to enterprise and we eventually, we got a little bit in the billing. Well, it never went very far. Thank you. And, but I think it was a lot more fun starting very narrow. And that's probably as an entrepreneur now, and my advice would be, I think the narrow and the smaller you start, I think the better. And then it's much more fun to grow your vision than to have to shrink it because it was way too broad to begin with.

Yeah. You know, one of the interesting things looking at the stories from your companies is, Is it— and I wonder, is it natural and is it a good thing that as you make that big ramp from the kind of company that's doing well, $1 to $10 million, and then figuring out how you grow from $10 to $30 and from $30 to $100, is it natural that things are just going to break? And is that a good thing? You know, maybe Mark, you can start off with us. Yeah. Is that a good thing?

How do you chart? It's good. It's all good. You have those, I will call them the "oh, shit" moments. OK, saying, wow, it's breaking here. It's good. And this is what I said earlier. Those moments, they are the best somehow. At least for me, they are my best moments of the company. When I'm looking back to the last couple of years, more difficult the problem was, and having a team working with you to solve that big problem, then implement a solution, see the solution working, and then the company scale again, this is the most rewarding moments in your professional life. And I want to have more of those moments. Actually, today, I'm like you, and I'm extremely paranoid. When the people, they come to me, they say, "Marc, everything is fine." I thought, "It cannot be fine." So if it's fine, means it's going to break somewhere. And everywhere in the company. And I'm extremely paranoid. When it's fine, most of the time I will call for a meeting to go a little bit deeper and say, "Let me understand if it's fine." And then you will find out something that doesn't work. And that is really extremely rewarding. Actually, the other rewarding moments when you work through that difficult time from the business perspective, I was with Steve, our CEO, and he called me at the end of the quarter. So he told me, "How, Mark, how it is going for the quarter?" Because he's not involved that much in the business. We used to be deeply involved. "Let me tell you, maybe it's good news. I am not that much involved neither in the business. I believe I touch probably only 4 deals. We have a team running the business." And he likes to do that. So he pick up the phone, he call one sales manager. And the sales manager, "Yes, everything is fine." It cannot be fine. And last quarter it was fine. That's when you can see the level of maturity of the company. But you have to stay extremely paranoid until you have implemented the solution, the people, the processes, tested those processes, the solution, validated that it's really working before moving to the next, I will say, potential challenge. Of future change of the organization and the company. But I love those moments. Actually, this is probably what I love the most about my job. It's those difficult times.

Yeah. So what are some of the things that broke, that you had to reinvent quickly at that company? And then we'll go to Götterdämmerung. Let's give people a sense for maybe that natural creative destruction process.

I believe the products. I remember the, I will call it the pivot moment for the company. We had an e-com, every month we have one e-com and that one was about the product organization. We moved up markets, lots of requirements, solutions start to break and we had the engineering organization, the product organization. And I remember of that afternoon we had our head of the engineering organization say, "Marc, we cannot go upmarket. It's putting too much stress on the people, on the product. The product cannot do that." This is exactly what you want to hear. So this is what I will call, you need to really make sure that you have those positive frictions in the system. And positive friction for me is a customer that is within my sweet spot coming there and say, I need this and this and this because the product cannot do that. So you need those moments. They are really important to push the envelope of the company. And from that time, I remember, Tina and I, I believe that we pivot the entire organization from the leadership perspective because we understood at that time that the people, they are getting drained making a change after change. And few people, they can really reenergize themselves and retackle those problems. So you have to bring different people to be able to bring the company from one level to another one. And I believe the change that we've made at that time at the product engineering organization, a lot of change in the marketing organization, the main gen, lead gen, really helped us to move to the next level. And the solution and the company wouldn't be who we are today if we didn't have that difficult time.

Mm-hmm. Yvonne, what have you seen? You've been at smaller companies and you've seen 'em grow big, like in New Relic's case. You've been at very big companies like VMware. It's a massive change in what those organizations are like. What things break and, and fall apart that you have to figure out and retool along the way?

Yeah, pretty much everything. I, I think the, the hardest problem is getting your stuff to to sell. So finding product-market fit and getting people who want to buy your product and making sure a competitor doesn't undercut you, that's problem number one to solve. What most people don't realize is once you've solved that problem, the next big problem you have is, oh my God, you're successful, and things break. And the simple analogy I'll use is that you're writing a piece of code. That's great. I'm writing code. I'm not going to comment the code. That would be stupid. It's stupid. I'm writing it. I know what it's supposed to do. And then I bring in you guys, and you're going to help me. And we create this really successful app, and it takes off like wildfire. And all of a sudden, my buddy Mark goes on vacation, and the thing breaks. And we can't figure out what went wrong. We're like, I can't believe you didn't write comments in this code.

It's always Mark's code.

I know.

It's always Mark's code. And so he comes back, and all of a sudden, he's like, OK, we make a deal. We're all going to write— We're going to comment the code. And all of a sudden, we've got scalability problems. And we have to realize that we have to break the code base into separate services and create APIs. Well, this is fundamentally what happened to the product code base as any code— successful software company scales. You kind of cut a lot of corners when you're younger. And then you grow and you scale and engineers leave. And so you have to create protocols because you have a problem. And it's usually problems that— create that. The organization is no different. And so I always would use this analogy at New Relic. My maddening moment is nothing was written down. That's fine when you're 20 people. When you're 400 people spread across 2 different offices, you're growing hand over fist, you have to write decisions down. And I use this analogy. I'm like, guys, it's just like you have to comment the code. And one of the gentlemen came in my office and he goes, Yvonne, you're right. I have to start writing stuff down. And he was an engineer and he said, but I've done the math. He goes, if I write stuff down after every meeting, that's going to take me 10 minutes times X number of meetings, it's Y amount of productivity that I'm losing out on. I'm like, okay. The company is scaled. You can't think about it that way. What you have to realize is your job changes as a manager and as a leader. And you don't write everything down, but write the important things down. And so those are just a couple examples of it is always changing. I kind of, for the economists in the room, there's complexity and there's volume. There's indifference curves of pain. And you, through complexity and volume of the business, you're going to hit an indifference curve, and your communications, your organization structure, things are going to have to change. And it'll be smooth sailing until you hit that next indifference curve. But that's healthy. That's growth. And it happens whether you're $1 million, whether you're $100 million.

Yeah. Garrett, what have you seen? What things break, and how do you work through that when you're building up companies as you've led and done with Big Machines, New Relic, now G2 you, Crown?

I mean, I think, and Ivan mentioned it, but to me it's usually the organization structure and the people.

Mm-hmm.

And I think especially going 1 to 100 and just to, you know, think about sales, I think 0 to 1, you can just be an entrepreneur selling and you probably should be, right? And then 1 to 10, you probably need now one sales leader, maybe a 5-person team they can manage well. And so yeah, now you have a 2-tier organization and frankly finding that first sales leader is already super hard. I remember at Big Machines I had 3 VPs of sales and then I had to become the VP of sales. And luckily I hired Matt Gorniak, who kind of became my business partner and sales leader. But at the time he just started selling and we kind of figured it out together. So first of all, even finding one good sales leader was really hard. And then we realized, you know, once you get to 10, 20, 30 million, all of a sudden, you know, Matt could only manage, I don't know, 7, 8, 9 reps. Right? And now you need regional VPs or segment VPs, and now you need multiple sales leaders. Matt had to go to a higher level role, more as a CRO and manage themes across multiple teams. And I think, and Matt has scaled extremely well. A lot of people don't. And then I think it's also hard as an entrepreneur when you have to explain to some people that were with you from day one that have done really well as an individual contributor, but you don't believe they're ready to be the leader. But, you know, I think somewhat they feel entitled and you kind of feel like you owe that to them. And having those conversations with people, hey, you're amazing, I love what you're doing, but you're not ready to scale to that next level yet. I have to bring in a different leader. So I think keeping that organization aligned, and it keeps breaking as you get bigger. And I was amazed when I was at Salesforce, you know, obviously Marc Benioff, right? Eventually end up with 10,000, well, people and hundreds of layers of organization. And you kind of have to keep breaking it and then keep fixing it with new leaders. And, uh, I think that that's always been a massive challenge for me. And I think we're going through it now at G2 Crowd where we're just kind of going through that transition from one sales leader to multiple and then getting the right leaders in every function. And it's, it's always hard.

Yeah. Yep. All right. So let's go back in the time machine. Now we can take you back 5, 10 years before. What do you want to tell yourself? That you didn't know back then, that you say now with the experience, the ups and downs, and the big success that each of you have had, "Wow, I really wish I would have known that." Because there's a lot of us in the audience who are looking at that, and they're staring up, how do they go up that 1 to 100 mountain for the first time, or wondering if it's always this hard. What would you really wish that you could go back in time and tell you tell yourself now that would have made it easier or given you different insights? Yvonne, let's start with you, and we'll go down.

Yeah, we kind of joked about this earlier. I have this conversation with myself all the time because I went from a company that I helped take public that was much larger down to a small startup. And it's great perspective. And the things that I tell myself every day, the smaller the company— we were talking about it earlier backstage. Stage, the more extreme the emotions, the highs and the lows. And so what I tell myself, you know, whenever you hit that low, whenever you have that oh my God moment in the car or, you know, for me on the Muni train, you just have to remind yourself, like, everybody goes through that. Like, you know, it is— when you're small, everything feels like life or death, but it helps you be agile in your thinking. It helps you focus. So one thing I take with me is just a lot of calmness of— there's a lot of things that seem like they're life or death, but they're really not. And just maintain perspective, surround yourself by smart people, and you'll work through that. The second thing is have conviction in your decisions. It is better to go full on and take a risk, and we all take risks and small companies, but go full on. Any of this wishy-washy stuff, you're doomed for failure. So it may not be the right thing, but take the risk, have measurements in place, and be open-minded that if it doesn't pan out the way you thought, you can change. But don't be wishy-washy. I'd say those are probably the two biggest things I take with me.

Yeah.

All right, Mark, how about you? We put you in the time machine.

Yeah.

What do you want to know back then?

I believe people, people, people, management, people. You are in extensive somehow, you know, human being somehow business. So people will make it or break it. And I learned it in a hard way. I'm at my first management job. I was 25. I was the youngest manager at PTC at that time. And at 31, They promote me to be the SVP to run the Japanese operation for PTC. Moving from managing 15 people to have an organization of almost 260 people. And we— I haven't been trained to do that. I didn't have any coach to do that. So that experience of dealing with the people and completely in different environments, You need to have interpreters. So you have to develop different senses somehow. You have really to look at the people and sometimes the body language says more than what the people they are saying there. That's probably my most important and my biggest assets when it comes to the people. I can make decision really quick. I don't need to spend hours and hours on meeting. I can understand where it doesn't work. And I will every time when it's a problem, I will all every time, you know, go back to the people. The people are creating problem or basically, you know, success. So when you have a problem, it's almost the people. And smaller the company is, you don't have any processes, it's people. Bigger it is, it's process and people. So the people, people, people, people, it's really key success factor. And, and, and, and I'm really basically good at that now, but I learned it all in the hard way.

Yeah.

Thanks. Thanks.

That was good.

Gárdar, what would you tell yourself back then? I know you had a chance to take a lot of the, the hard-fought lessons that you've won through Big Machines, put those into practice at SteelBrick, now into G2 Crowd. So if you can go back, 5, 10 years, what do you wish you would have known through those experiences that you'd tell yourself now?

And I think a lot of it was what Ivan said, but if I were to put it in one word, it's breathe.

[SPEAKING RUSSIAN] There you go.

And I did get an iPhone for Christmas from my wife. I'm not wearing it today, but it has a nice breathe app. Now it's automated it. But I think for me, getting greater consciousness, self-awareness, and I think for me it didn't happen until I was 40. And my guru, Jim Dethmer, I think he says as a male that's common. And I think I didn't even grow up until I was 40. So those of you that are younger, I hope you can get there sooner. And I have a daughter, and I can already see she's 10 and probably already emotionally more mature than my 13-year-old boys. So I think women probably get there sooner. But for me, it took till 40 to get some self-awareness, consciousness. And I do think, you know, whether it's my work, my family, any part of my life, just being more conscious, more present, taking care of myself, which then allows me to deal with, you know, whatever challenge comes along.

[Speaker:BRAD_STONE] That's great. Great. Well, look, hopefully this has been helpful for everybody. We can show 3 amazing enterprise tech leaders that have gone through a lot, have done a lot, and accomplished a lot, and you can see some shared experience. It's not always easy. It's not usually easy at all, and yet that's how great companies are built. That's how how you pioneer a new market or disrupt an existing one. And so I want to really thank our panel for being real, sharing the stories, the insights, the hard-fought lessons. Thank you very much.

Great.